This is good news in two ways: (1) it allows us to run our affairs rather than having them run from Whitehall and (2) it means I no longer have to hear half-informed people blustering on about how “we need our politicians to get their act together”.

It’s taken a while to get to this point and we’ve lost the bottom end of the North East on the way, but our politicians have got their act together, so now it’s time to change the narrative. We can no longer huff and puff and blame councillors. Instead we have to look at this opportunity and see what we can make of it.

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What that means for the business community is not sitting on the sidelines. Many firms are already going above and beyond their day-to-day operations to improve the region. But those who aren’t – and especially those who have been pointing the fingers at our elected representatives over the last few years – need to get on board.

The North East has some of the lowest productivity and the lowest rates of entrepreneurship in the country, and (not coincidentally) some of the highest rates of unemployment.

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Solving those issues will need a combined effort from schools, colleges, businesses and politicians. We will have disagreements along the way, and that’s cool, but we should also have an agreed end point (and for me that would be more and better jobs, a fairer and more equal region, and translating the success of our primary schools to secondary level).

It might also be worth saying from the get-go that devolution will probably achieve very little in the short term. The North East has some deep-rooted problems and none of them will be changed overnight. Devolution is not a magic wand though it is a good start.

It’s worth saying too that most people in these parts probably welcomed the Budget not for its announcements on devolution or even the Metro cash, but because the price of beer didn’t go up. Getting the region as a whole to be interested in its future, not just the chattering classes (like me), is essential.